Ghost of a Machine
by Jezie Lin 1230
Summary: When the unimaginable happens, sometimes there are too many potential actions and the possibilities immobilize you.
1. Chapter 1

"Ghost of a Machine"

By Jezie Lin

Summary: When the unimaginable happens, sometimes there are too many potential actions and the possibilities immobilize you.

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognize and will not profit in any way from this work of fiction.

--  
Black holes are not really black. The sparkle of small pieces of doomed matter dragged through the failing light creates a myriad of rainbows. A splash of color that dies as quickly as it appeared. As the black hole inexorably drew more and more of the bits and pieces into its maw, the irregular lightshow continued.

No one would ever see this dance of transcendence at the horizon of being and not, no one would marvel at the brilliance of creation remaking itself. No one would ever know…

Once, this had been a warm yellow sun, benevolently warming its system of planets and the people who lived there. Now it was just the last stop to oblivion and nothing was left.

Nothing except the starship that wasn't really there.

--

The planet was unremarkable; brown and blue with large polar ice caps, colder than humans would find comfortable. Winds howled over the empty plains, scouring down to the rock and carving its paths across the land, and then stirred up violent storms when they meet the oceans.

Not a place you would choose to live in.

Far above this desolation, the Andromeda Ascendant had a problem. Her captain, crew and avatar had disappeared. No sign, no message, no indication there was a problem. Just gone.

And she did not know what to do about it.

Her programming demanded that she find them, save them, get them back at all costs, but where to start looking? She had already ascertained that they were gone, but did not know how, let alone where.

Maybe if she reviewed the avatar's transmissions again…

--

It had all started with a song. Well, maybe not a song as much as a series of notes the Andromeda had picked up from deep space, a lilting melody that sounded both sad and desperate and demanding. Like something lost and forgotten.

In retrospect, she wished she had just ignored it. But no, she had told Dylan and he'd told the rest of the crew and of course Trance felt it was something that should be looked into. And Dylan always seemed to do what Trance wanted.

So they followed the music back to a small planet that did not even rate a name, just a number and a set of coordinates in the database. The survey team who had discovered it 130 years ago described it as an inhospitable climate with no valuable resources and the only thing of note was the ruins of a large stone fortification, but no life forms were found.

A dead planet singing to the stars.

--

Andromeda traced the signal to the remains of a huge circular building in the center of the ruins. Its first floor walls were mostly intact even after the upper stories had collapsed. What remained standing had long settled and seemed stable enough for her crew to safely explore so she gave the clearance for the Eureka Maru to launch and watched them until they were down and inside the ruins. Then she monitored them via Rommie.

Everything was going as planned. Her crew explored numerous ancient structures that had collapsed due to old age and admired the faded artwork that covered the remaining walls. The ruins felt almost like the ancient Egyptian archives she maintained from old Earth and Harper kept making mummy jokes.

The center of the building was a large open room with a high ceiling supported by massive columns and braced with graceful arches and absolutely nothing that could produce the song they could hear drifting softly through the room.

Harper and Beka were arguing about the harmonic frequency of stone when the crew just was not there any more. No power surge or flash of light; just gone.

At first, she had assumed that Rommie had malfunctioned and sent a message to Dylan. But Dylan did not answer her call and then nobody else answered either.

Then for an endless moment, she thought they were all dead and the thought of losing her captain just about overloaded her AI core. She performed another in-dept scan of the area, she even descended to an dangerous altitude to get the best possible readings, but she could find no sign of them, any parts of them or any trace that they been there at all.

It seemed they disappeared without a trace.

--

Her avatar had been transmitting every moment the crew was on the ground. So why did she not know where they went?

Should she have been more worried? Should she have stopped them? But no, this wasn't anything unusual; Dylan and the rest were always investigating something. And they always seemed to get into trouble, and then get out of it okay.

So she wouldn't panic. Yet.


	2. Chapter 2

_Chapter Two: Too Clever By Half_

_A/N: Here is the back-story I had in mind when I wrote the main plot. I was not originally going to include it, but the story had too many "because-it's-in-the-script" moments, so I decided I needed to explain a bit._

_A/N2: You can thank my wonderful beta Ujai and his OCD for haranguing me into posting again._

_I still do not own anything nor have any right to play in this world. _

_What lies between the edges of matter? There has to be something, otherwise there could be no edges, but the common belief of emptiness could be correct it its own way. Take the void of space for example. An abyss of nothingness; light races across it and micro meteors rain through it even though the common conciseness is that it is empty. Even voids have to contain something, even if it is just more void. _

_The dead planet's name was Bywawnta, a name as forgotten as its long extinct population. Once it was the home world of the Lysherians, a small and generally heavyset bipod with two overly large multi-colored eyes. Their hands were wonderfully dexterous with three fingers and two thumbs and they could build and repair just about anything. _

_The Lysherians liked to think that they were the only people on Bywawnta but in reality, Bywawnta had another sentient population, the Bollakans. _

_The Bollakans did not have any obvious reptilian traits, they just looked like they would be happier sunning themselves on a rock someplace, and in fact, they did like to sun themselves as much as possible, completely content with their existence. _

_This contentment with life baffled the Lysherians and had to be a sign of a lower life form that needed to be managed. Since they valued hard work above all else and always strode for advancements and learning, they decided to ensure the Bollakans were properly educated. _

_Unfortunately, this decision would have catastrophic consequences. _

_Batteries of skill test showed the Bollakans had an aptitude for science and while the scientist would not dream of letting Bollokans do any real work, they were happy to explain everything. Including the history of one vial of horribly effective strain of bacterial warfare. _

_The chief scientist explained to microscopic detail on what it did to Lysherians He really should have been less ego centric and explained what it did to everything else because that group of students left his labs with thoughts of genocide running thru their heads. _

_Two weeks later, the world ended. The bug, once freed, turned out to be even more lethal that expected. It killed everything larger than mold spores and quickly spread to the space stations and on to the colonies._

_Within two weeks, everything that could die was dead. _

_Only one of Bywawnta's colonies survived its death and that was only because it was lost, completely and embarrassingly inaccessible from Bywawnta. _

_Five years prior to the end of the world, a strange and wondrous artifact was found drifting in space. Recognizing it as powerful and potentially useful, the Lysherians brought it back to study it. It took months of hard labor, but finally the scientists discovered that the device was an instantaneous teleportation portal. _

_This portal was extremely stable and after no change was reported after several weeks of observations, a robot team was sent thru. On the other side was a planet of lush green continents and deep, blue oceans. Perfect for a colony. _

_Over two hundred people had successfully crossed and the colony was starting to thrive when a scientist discovered that the portal could be expanded to send larger objects thru. _

_Large enough to sent spacecraft through. _

_The military leaders and scientific experts that had agreed it was perfectly safe to place a colony on an unexplored planet in unexplored space suddenly changed their minds and demanded a ship be sent though to ascertain the safety, location and possibilities of a base for further exploration. _

_The LSC Morgan's Run, an M-436 class warship, was the most powerful ship they could fit through the expanded portal. Hopefully, it would be large enough to protect the fledging colony from any unpleasantness and evacuate it if necessary. _

_Amidst much pomp and circumstance, the ship was pulled though the portal and disappeared with a pop as the portal shorted out and disappeared._


	3. Chapter 3

_Chapter Three: Over The River And Through The Hills_

_I still do not own anything nor have any right to play in this world. _

_For an endless moment, Captain Dylan Hunt was buried under a wave of vertigo. The room spun and twisted and he couldn't tell which way was up. Then, just suddenly as it started, everything was normal again. _

_Except for the fact he was no longer in a ruined building, freezing his assets off. With a quick check of his crew, who were in various states of picking themselves up off the ground, he looked around at where they where._

_Bright and sunny and warm, rolling hills leading to an impressive snow-capped mountain range. He could see a river in the distance and heard birds in the trees, pretty with no immediate threats. _

"_Hunt to Andromeda, Hunt to Andromeda, are you reading?" When his ship failed to answer, he looked to Rommie. "Can you contact the ship?"_

"_Negative, Dylan. I can find no trace of the Andromeda."_

"_Great, just great," he sighed. "Any idea what happened? Or where we are?"_

"_Well, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore," Harper quipped as he finally got the ground to stop swaying and was able to pull himself up. _

_Beka threw him a dirty look, probably planning to say something similar herself. Those two were having some sort of competition on who could use the most Old Earth history. They had originally done it to make Dylan feel more at home after his forced hibernation, but now just to one-up each other. It was starting to give him a headache._

"_Trance?" he rubbed at his forehead absently. She was his most trusted crewmember after the Andromeda herself and usually has something useful to contribute. Not that the rest of them didn't, it was just that while Beka was a great captain herself and Harper was a self-proclaimed genius, but both of them would lose track of the larger picture. Tyr was the strong silent type and had some warrior's reluctance about contradicting the superior officer and besides, Dylan had a lingering unease about the man, even if he hadn't done anything to rate it. _

"_We are not where we were." Trance had that not quite there look in her eyes and Dylan could hear Beka's eyes rolling from here. "We have traveled a great distance, but the place we left is still close by."_

"_Close by as in easy to get back to or close by as look but don't touch?" Harper worried aloud._

"_I don't know." Trance admitted. "I sense that something important is going to happen. Maybe we can find some people to ask."_

"_Where? In case you didn't notice, we are in the middle of nowhere!" _

"_There is a settlement just over five miles to the north of us." At her captain's questioning look, she answered, "I can see smoke from their fires."_

_The hillside was crisscrossed with deep gullies filled with just a little water and a whole lot of thick sticky mud. The first one they tried to cross almost swallowed Rommie whole. It had taken all of them to pull her free from the mire and left them covered in mud and exhausted._

_From them on, they took the long way thru the gullies, looking for narrow spots they could jump safely. _

_Because of, or maybe in spite of this wobbly route, the crew of the Andromeda only managed to hike almost half of the distance over surprising difficult terrain before they found the natives. Or, more accurately, the natives found them. _

_Long ago, an advanced people founded the city of Enduring Prospects; people who had traveled the stars and settled new worlds of their own, but not any more. The sophisticated buildings were repaired with wood and mud bricks, makeshift fireplaces added for warmth and light, and no sign of power or running water. _

_These people had fallen back into a dark age._


End file.
